Mobile devices, such as mobile phones and mobile computing devices (e.g., laptops and/or tablet computers), are used frequently by people in industry or agriculture. For example, a user who performs maintenance or repair work in a factory operates the mobile device(s) to read information that relates to his/her work. There are scenarios where the mobile device communicates with a back-end system over a cellular phone system (e.g., GSM, UMTS, HSPA, LTE) or a wireless computer system (e.g., WLAN). The back-end system can be an enterprise resource planning system (ERP system) to provide work related data to the user.
The mobile device has a display with objects such as text messages, graphics, pictures, maps, photos, or even video sequences. Much simplified, the display is coupled to a display memory (or frame buffer) in which data is available for each pixel of the display. However, making data images available in memory—often referred to as transforming or rendering—is a process that requires computation, by a general processor of the mobile device (central processing unit CPU), and/or by specialized processors (such as a graphics processing unit (GPU)). During this transformation process, data items are converted to data images. For example, a string of characters for the word “ATTENTION” is converted to a data image by composing the image from pre-defined elements (like fonts) for each character. Alternatively, in a further example, a map of the factory is composed from image elements (symbols for engines, footways, or the like) and text elements. Especially for mobile devices, the transformation process is not free of technical constraints. For example, the transformation process drains energy from the battery of the device. In addition, until the object becomes available on screen, the user might perceive a waiting time. Further, in case data items are retrieved from remote servers (e.g., the above-mentioned ERP system), there are further limitations in terms of bandwidth and costs.